Leadership political action committee donations and party status: A technical and theoretical extension

Abstract

A recent study by Aldrich, Ballard, Lerner, and Rohde (2017) examines whether a specific type of money—donations from leadership political action committees—is systematically related to party goals outside of policy influence. Their model is theoretically incomplete, as leadership political action committees donate considerable money to candidates who do not help the party win new seats or maintain ideological cohesion. I account for this behavior by introducing a new conditional predictor: incumbency. When modeled as a triple interaction with party status and ideological fit, incumbency helps better explain the donating behavior of leadership political action committees. This interaction is paired with a technical extension, more directly modeling the multiplicity of races in which leadership political action committees do not make a donation in a campaign cycle. I find that extending the study with a more appropriate model allows us to draw better inferences about the behavior of leadership political action committees.